Origins: A Memoir

Preliminary Gpropings

ONE

My research began with a false start: an experience I had at age thirty, an experience I should never have had. In fact, none of the protagonists should have had it. In the past, whenever I wanted to bring it up, I managed to persuade myself it was still too soon.

Of course it is not too soon now. It is almost too late.

It was a Sunday, a Sunday in the summer, in a village in the Mountains. My father had died shortly before dawn, and I had been given the most painful task imaginable—to go to my grandmother’s and hold her hand when she was told she had just lost a son.

My father was her second child, and we had agreed that my uncle, her eldest son, would phone her to give her the news. Told this way, things have a semblance of normality. But in my family, normality is always an illusion. For instance, before that summer I had seen this uncle, who had just turned sixty-seven, only once before in my life.

So I had come in the morning, and my grandmother had clasped me in her arms for a long time, as she always did. Then, inevitably, she asked the question I dreaded most: How is your father doing this morning?

I had prepared an answer, coaching myself on my way over.

I’ve come directly from the house. I didn’t stop by the hospital …

This was both the absolute truth and the most horrid lie.

A few minutes later the telephone rang. Normally I would have hurried to answer it so my grandmother would be spared the effort of getting up. On that day, I just asked if she wanted me to answer for her.

If you could just bring the phone closer to me …

I moved it closer, picked up the receiver, and handed it to her.

I couldn’t hear what was being said on the other end, but I’ll never forget my grandmother’s response.

Yes, I’m sitting down.

My uncle was afraid that she might be standing and might fall to the ground after hearing what he was going to tell her.

I also remember the look in her eyes as she said, Yes, I’m sitting down. It was the look of someone condemned to death who has just seen the gallows looming in the distance. Later, when I thought about it, I realized it was probably she who had advised her children to make sure a person is sitting down before announcing devastating news. As soon as her son asked the question, she knew to expect the worst.

We cried, she and I, sitting side by side, holding hands, for a long time.

Then she said to me, I still expected to hear that your father had regained consciousness.

No. From the minute he collapsed, it was over.

•  •  •

My father had fallen in the street, near his car, ten days earlier. The person who was with him had heard him exclaim only a surprised ah! before he collapsed, unconscious. A few hours later my telephone rang in Paris. A cousin told me the news, leaving very little room for hope: He’s in a bad state, a very bad state.

I returned to my native country on the next flight and found my father in a coma. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully; he was breathing and sometimes moved a hand. It was hard to believe he was no longer alive. I begged the physicians to test his brain once again, then a third time. It was pointless. The encephalogram was flat. He had suffered a massive hemorrhage. We had to resign ourselves.

I still had hope, my grandmother whispered. No one had dared tell her the truth till now.

We soon lapsed into silence, our sanctuary. In my family, we speak very little and with deliberation; we are always careful to be restrained, polite, and dignified. While this can sometimes be irritating to others, it is a long-ingrained habit, one that will be passed down to future generations.

We were still holding hands. She let go of mine only to remove her glasses and wipe them in the fold of her dress. As she was putting them back on, she gave a start.

What day is today?

August 17.

Your grandfather also died on August 17!

She frowned in a way that she sometimes did. Then she seemed to get over her outrage and settle into resignation. She didn’t say another word. I took her hand in mine again and held it tight. Though the same loss weighed on our hearts, the images in our minds weren’t the same.

My mind wasn’t on my grandfather that day, or indeed on the following days. I thought only about my father, his large face, his artist’s hands, his serene voice, his Lebanon, his sorrows, and the bed in which he had passed away. For me, and for all those close to him, his death was an emotional cataclysm. The fact that he had had a kind of rendezvous with his own father on a predetermined date merely elicited, from those to whom I mentioned it at the time, a brief and banal meditation on the irony of fate and the unfathomable ways of Heaven.

There, that’s all, end of episode.

There should have been a sequel, but there wasn’t. I should have drawn my grandmother into a long conversation about the person who had been the man in her life, but she died five years later without our broaching the subject again. By then she and I didn’t live in the same country. I had settled in France, and she never traveled outside Lebanon again. But I used to come back to see her every so often, and I could have found time to question her. I didn’t. To be honest, I simply didn’t think of it.

It was strange behavior that can probably be explained in the jargon of specialists who plumb the depths of the psyche, but I shall blame myself for it to my last day. How could I—by nature an inquisitive person capable of getting up from the dinner table five times in the course of a single meal to check the etymology of a word or its exact spelling, or the date of birth of a Czech composer—have exhibited such a woeful lack of curiosity about my own grandfather?

And this even though, ever since childhood, I had been told many stories about him—whose given name was Botros—stories that should have roused me from my indifference.

The following story, for instance. One day, one of his brothers, who lived in Cuba, was in serious trouble and wrote him anxious letters begging him to come to his rescue. On the last letters to reach him, the four corners of the paper were burned, a sign of danger and emergency. So my grandfather quit his work and set sail on the next ship. He learned Spanish on board in forty days. By the time he arrived, he could take the floor in court and get his brother out of trouble.

This is a story I’ve heard since the day I was born, yet I never tried to find out whether there was anything to it, or if it was just a boastful legend of the kind so many families cultivate. Nor did I try to find out the full story behind my family’s Cuban adventure. Only now do I know it.

I was also always told, Your grandfather was a great poet, a courageous thinker, an inspired orator, and people came from far and wide to listen to him. Alas, all his writings have been lost! Yet I later found his writings; all I had to do was look for them. My grandfather had assembled and dated them all in a neat, calligraphic handwriting; he had cared about his writings to the end of his life and had always wanted to bring them to public attention. But he died unpublished, as others die intestate, and he remained anonymous.

Another oft-repeated tale: Botros never wanted to baptize his children; he didn’t believe in God or the Devil, and he made a point of trumpeting this loudly, causing a permanent scandal in the village. Again, I never really looked into this. And my family was very careful not to discuss it.

Do I have the courage to confess that I spent my entire youth in our village without ever putting flowers on my grandfather’s grave, or even knowing where it was located, or having the curiosity to look for it?

I could list a thousand other reasons for crying mea culpa, but I shall refrain from doing so. After all, what is the point? I need say only that I would probably have remained in the same state of ignorance forever had the road of my ancestors not intersected with mine, in Paris, via a detour.

TWO

After this false start, there was the real start, many years later. I don’t deserve credit for it, or hardly. Admittedly, after my father’s death I made it clear that I wanted to know more about my family’s past. I followed up by asking several close relatives seven or eight questions about my grandfather and my other forebears. This in no way resembled the obsessive dedication that takes hold of me regularly when I throw myself into real research. It seemed that where my own origins were concerned, I reverted to a kind of hereditary placidity and the sterile dignity of silence.

Credit is due—all the credit—to my diplomat friend Luis Domingo. One day in the course of conversation he asked me whether I was related to a Cuban official who had the same family name as mine.

I made him repeat the first name—Arnaldo? No, it wasn’t familiar to me. But then I told him, casually, that I had had family in Havana a long time ago. The instant I heard myself say this, I felt as though I were being informed of it for the first time.

I had got to know Luis Domingo in Beirut in the early 1970s. I was a young journalist and he a young diplomat at the Spanish embassy. Since then, we’ve never lived in the same city, but we’ve remained close.

Every time he came through Paris, we would meet and take long strolls through the streets, usually talking until daybreak, reminiscing, speculating, and reinventing the world. We reinvented the destiny of Lebanon mainly, but also of Cuba, where Luis Domingo had been posted for many years and whose future worried him. Yet I had never once thought of mentioning my family’s Cuban connection.

In fact, I never would have brought it up if he hadn’t pressed me so insistently that night. Under his barrage of questions, I made the effort of putting together all the bits and pieces of stories that had filtered down to me through the years. That’s how I discovered, not without astonishment, that entire lives were already there, in my memory, in vague outline.

The first thing I described, with pride, was my grandfather’s trip to Havana, especially his quick mastery of Spanish and his successful argument in court.

He was a lawyer?

As far as I know, he was a teacher and headmaster, but I guess he also studied law.

To be honest, I didn’t really know!

And his brother?

His name was Gebrayel, which is the equivalent of Gabriel for us. He was a businessman. He made a fortune in Cuba and had great political ambitions. But he made enemies and died in mysterious circumstances.

In what year?

Around 1900, or the twenties, I don’t know exactly …

"He may have had children or grandchildren who are still living in Cuba …

"Once again I had to admit that I was completely in the dark.

•  •  •

Later that evening I remembered a family legend; I almost told it to Luis Domingo but refrained from doing so. I was afraid of his incredulity and his contempt if he suspected me of believing it. We were both in the habit of mocking the irrational and its followers, and this incident certainly didn’t fit in with our shared convictions.

The legend involves another brother of my grandfather’s, a priest in the Melchite Church whose religious name was Theodoros. He kept a personal diary all his life, with painstaking regularity; he made his daily entries just as he read his breviary, at set hours. He wrote the dates and chapter headings in red ink and the body of the text in black ink.

One evening, the story went, he was sitting at his worktable in front of his diary when one of the inkwells suddenly cracked apart and a thin trickle of red ink ran down the table and over the sheet. The priest followed it with his eyes, terrified; his throat tightened, and his limbs no longer obeyed him. After a moment he pulled himself together and took up his pen again to relate the incident. He noted the day and then pulled his watch out of his pocket to jot down the hour. The hands had stopped.

Great-uncle Theodoros lived in a monastery in the Mountains at the time; he came out of his cell, called all the other monks who were present, and asked them to join him in prayer.

Need I add that what happened next is what always happens in stories that begin like this? Namely, that several months after this incident, a letter arrived from Cuba announcing that Gebrayel had died at the precise moment when his brother’s red inkwell had cracked apart.

Don’t ask me if I believe in this small miracle. I really don’t know … Probably not … The angel of reason is always by my side restraining me. The one thing I can state with certainty, however, is that Theodoros kept telling this story until his dying day, and all those who heard it believed it.

Before we parted that night, Luis Domingo asked me if I wanted to get in touch with Arnaldo, my Havana cousin, and send him some sort of message. He would make sure it reached him. I went to my bookcase and fetched a book in Castilian about the old country, where there is a brief mention of our family. I inscribed it with a few courteous lines and entrusted the book to my friend with the feeling of throwing not a bottle into the sea, but a stone into a well filled with ghosts.

THREE

The following night, during my regular bout of insomnia, I kept brooding over our conversation. By morning I wanted to know more about this great-uncle who had sailed away and perished in that distant isle.

This didn’t call for a serious investigation. I had only to call an eighty-nine-year-old cousin in Beirut, whose memory was still crystal clear, and ask her a few simple questions that I had never formulated or thought of before.

First of all: Did she know the year of Gebrayel’s death?

Not the precise year, Léonore admitted. But she remembered that at the end of the First World War, when the family could once again receive mail, she had learned of the death of a number of relatives who were living in the Americas. One of them was Gebrayel. Yes, he died a violent death, but unrelated to the war. An accident …

My mother, on the other hand, whom I phoned immediately after talking to Léonore, echoed the other theory, the one that is still most widely believed in our family: He was assassinated! That’s what your father always said. An act of sabotage or something of the sort …

These brief exchanges took place in June. A short time later, my mother left on vacation. For some twenty years she has been spending her winters in France and her summers in Lebanon, just as we used to spend the winter in Beirut and the summer in the village.

When she returned to Paris in September, she told me she had brought back something that would interest me: letters; letters dating from that period.

Your grandmother gave them to me, along with other things. She said, ‘I know you at least will preserve them!’ Since you quizzed me, I spent a bit of time searching through these papers. It wasn’t easy. There’s a trunkful!

A trunkful of documents? At home?

Yes, in the big closet in my bedroom. Letters, photographs, notebooks, newspaper clippings, receipts, notarized deeds … Initially I was going to sort them out, but I had to give up. It was too complicated. I left everything as is. But I brought you these letters because they’re from Gebrayel.

From Gebrayel!

I had let out a cry, but it was an inward cry, and it didn’t show, except for a slight trembling of the lips.

My mother took the letters out of her handbag and handed them to me unceremoniously, as if they were yesterday’s mail.

Three letters. All three mailed in Havana in 1912. In the blink of an eye Gebrayel ceased to be a ghostly figure lost in an indeterminate past. I now held in my hands pages that bore his handwriting, his voice, his breathing, his sweat. Pages addressed to my grandfather, who had kept them and left them to his widow—his widow, who had given them to her daughter-in-law, who, by this gesture, was entrusting them to me.

I rested the letters flat on my open palms. I turned them over one by one and took time to feel their weight, delighted to note that they were heavy and plump, but not yet daring to take the sheets out of the envelopes.

It wasn’t until the following morning, in the tranquillity of my study, behind closed doors, on a bare wooden table I had carefully cleared of all clutter and carefully dusted, that I felt ready to let these fragile witnesses speak.

I spread them out before me very gently. And before giving them a close reading, I started by lazily running my eyes over them, gleaning a few sentences here and there.

From Havana, April 25, 1912, to my brother Botros, may the Lord preserve him and allow me to see him again in perfect health …

May God’s Grace inspire us to put an end to the scattering of our family and thereby extinguish the sufferings of absence from our hearts …

Last month I was constantly sick, and had to leave Havana for several days to recover my strength. In fact, I decided to go live by the oceanfront for a time, very close to Castillo del Moro, to get away from my work and breathe some pure air …

My business worries are weighing too heavily on my mind, which is the mind of an ordinary man, and even slightly below ordinary …

Finally I must beg you to excuse my style for being so dull, and all my mistakes, which you certainly noticed in these pages; I must tell you that I’ve forgotten Arabic, which, by the way, I learned very badly in my youth …

My Cuban great-uncle’s humility, apparent beyond the polite manners of the period and the use of accepted epistolary phrases, could not but move me. Yet another palpable, omnipresent fact lay right before my eyes: his ardent desire to show off, obvious from the moment you looked at his envelopes. His full name was spread out across the middle in large navy blue characters headed by shaded dropped initials; his name, or at least his initials, appeared in six other places, in smaller type, sometimes legible only with a magnifying glass. Gabriels, G’s, and M’s were everywhere. In the upper-left-hand corner, the initials were even drawn like vines clasping the terrestrial globe.

I couldn’t help but smile at this, but with tenderness. Our ancestors are our children; we peer through a hole in the wall and watch them play in their rooms, and they can’t see us.

How could I blame Gebrayel for wanting to show the whole world, particularly his relatives, how successful he had become? In addressing his brother Botros, who was older and obviously more educated than he, he tried hard to make himself small and humble, and he apologized for his ignorance. But then he began to brag again, with a swagger, not always gauging the effect his words might have on those who still lived in the village and struggled to make ends meet, toiling under the weight of debts and taxes. To complain about having too much business! And blithely writing:

As far as the customs are concerned, please let my suppliers know they have no reason to worry! They can send me all the merchandise they want without giving it much thought, and they don’t have to bother to change the invoices; here they let me pay whatever I agree to pay, and if I don’t want to pay anything, I don’t pay anything …

There was better, or worse:

Soon I plan to buy the house that the government built eight years ago for General Máximo Gómez. It is located at the corner of Prado and Monte avenues. The new government palace is being built across the street, and right behind it will be the new railroad station linking the capital to the rest of the island …

Having no idea who this general was, I looked him up in some books and discovered that in Cuba, Máximo Gómez was—and still is—an important historical figure. A native of Santo Domingo, he had sided with the Cubans in the war of independence, even rising to the rank of commander in chief of their revolutionary armies. When the Spanish were defeated in 1898 and the young Republic was born, Gómez could have played a prominent role, but perhaps because of his foreign descent he felt he should become an ordinary citizen again, so he lived the rest of his life in seclusion, poor, without an official post, though revered by all. In 1904, as a mark of gratitude, the government decided to build a beautiful villa for him in the heart of the capital, but he died the following year before having had time to move into it.

That my great-uncle Gebrayel could covet this very house seemed to substantiate the wildest family legends. Particularly since he wasn’t just expressing a vague desire, as can be seen by the telegram written in English and sent from Havana to Beirut on October 25, 1912, to the address of a bookseller friend. I found it inserted in one of the three envelopes:

TELL BOTROS BOUGHT GOMEZ BUILDING SEVENTY THOUSAND ARRANGE COMING CONDITIONS MAIL GEBRAYEL

Indeed, there is also the letter of confirmation:

I sent you a telegram yesterday, at our friend Baddour’s address, telling you I had just purchased the building I mentioned in my previous letters; the registration was done this week, and tomorrow, God willing, I’ll start the renovation work … In that telegram, I also asked you to come to Cuba as soon as possible …

FOUR

What facts I had learned so far reassured me: my relatives had not made things up. I almost felt ashamed for thinking they were capable of it. My family isn’t in the habit of inventing things. If anything, they are excessively silent, with a tendency—why deny it?—to conceal things. They are usually loath to brag in any way.

So the great-uncle in America had really existed. And he had really become wealthy. But this did not necessarily mean that the story I had been told in my childhood was true. In fact, the opposite seemed to be the case; in his letters, as far as I could tell from a first reading, Gebrayel seemed to have no more difficulties with the courts than with the customs. He seemed radiant, prosperous, self-confident, and I saw no reason why my grandfather would have sailed halfway around the globe to come to his rescue.

I decided to read the correspondence more attentively. This was no easy matter. Many words were no more than shapeless brown ink spots, the characters hardly distinguishable; in other places, the paper had softened, as though, over time, it had been attacked by a corrosive acid. With patience and luck, I would probably manage to decipher, or at least guess, the essentials, but I was resigned to the idea that some passages would remain impenetrable.

Was it after receiving these letters, and this appeal, that my future grandfather sailed to Cuba?

The first of the three letters, posted in Havana on May 8, 1912, had arrived in Beirut on June 2, according to the postmark on the back. Someone, in all likelihood Botros, had written in lead pencil at the very top of the envelope, in Arabic, Tajawab aleih, meaning He has been answered.

The postmarks on the second letter are faded, but it must have been received very soon after the first, because it was written on May 19, 1912. In the stamped circle, where you could still make out the H of Havana but hardly anything else, there is the same sentence penciled in the same handwriting: He has been answered.

On the third letter, only the dispatch date is still legible: October 28 of the same year. We can assume that Botros received it in late November or early December, but there is no indication that he replied to it.

Was that because he had already left for Cuba in response to his brother’s entreaty?

I had a sudden urge to know the answer immediately—an irrepressible urge, the kind I have grown to fear as one might fear certain temptations of the flesh, though these urges are the beginning of all my passions, exhilarations, and excesses.

Only one person could enlighten me: Léonore. But it was probably better to wait until the following day. According to my watch, it was four in the morning; that meant it was either five or six o’clock in Beirut, I couldn’t remember which. In any case it was too early, much too early, even for my octogenarian cousin.

I thought this through rationally, then dialed the phone number. It was as though my rational self had completed its assignment and my other self had taken over.

Léonore picked up after three rings. No hello, just, First swear no misfortune has occurred!

Her voice didn’t sound sleepy, which was one good thing. But she was clearly nervous and worried. Obediently, I swore that no misfortune had occurred, and I stopped speaking.

She breathed noisily. Thank God! Now you can speak. I’m listening. Who is it?

She hadn’t recognized my voice. I identified myself, told her I was calling from Paris, and said I hoped she wasn’t angry with me for scaring her.

She sighed. You’ve always been incredibly impatient, just like your father.

This wasn’t serious criticism, just playful teasing. My father had been her favorite cousin. Thanks to him, she was fond of me too, and I could do no wrong. In fact, we then exchanged all the tender words that were customary between us.

Afterward she said, But I shouldn’t be chattering like this long-distance; calls are expensive. And I’m sure you had something urgent …

I paused momentarily to avoid following up on this last word. Then I asked her if by chance she remembered what year my grandfather had gone to Cuba to visit Gebrayel.

There was silence at the other end and slow breathing, followed by, This was clearly very urgent.

I stammered a few embarrassed words.

Don’t say anything. Let me think … Well, no, I don’t have the foggiest idea. I don’t think I ever knew. I was told that Botros went to see his brother in Cuba and that on the boat, he learned—

Spanish, yes, that I know! And what else?

Nothing else! No point in racking my old brain, there’s nothing there. No date. Sorry.

So I asked her if she could think of anyone in the family who would know the answer.

She pondered for a while.

No! Among the living, no one.

Then a bitter laugh reached me from the other end of the phone. I joined in politely before hanging up. I spent the rest of the day blaming myself for having let all my elderly family members pass away one after the other without ever bothering to record their words. And I promised myself that any time I met one in the future, I would make them speak at length.

Remorse having run its course, I said to myself that probably Léonore had unwittingly directed me to the only path still available to me. Since questioning the living didn’t serve much purpose, I was going to question the dead. At least those who had left records of their lives. Wasn’t there an entire trunk in my mother’s closet humming with their voices?

FIVE

Logically, I should have hopped onto the first plane to see the documents that were waiting for me. I had promised myself that I would. I had even announced my intention to my relatives—yet I failed to take the plunge. This kind of decision has never been easy for me. I seldom return to my country of origin, and then only when circumstances compel me to.

Does this mean I don’t miss my Mountains? Of course I do—as God is my witness! There are love affairs like this; they thrive on absence and distance. So long as one is elsewhere, one can curse the separation and sincerely believe that one need only get together again to be happy. Once the couple is together, the scales fall from one’s eyes. Distance preserves love; abolish distance, and you run the risk of abolishing love.

Because of this, I have cultivated distance for many years, as I might water sad-looking flowers on my windowsill.

Occasionally, however, I do return to my Mountains. The circumstance is almost always the death of a loved one—someone who has died over there, or died in exile but could never conceive of being exiled eternally in a foreign burial place. So I return. I retread the paths of my origins and weep openly, as though I were grieving only for the dead.

That is what happened this time. A close relative had passed away in Paris. She was far too considerate of other people’s convenience to demand being buried in her village, but there is no doubt that this is what she would have wished. Arrangements were made for her final trip home so she could rest next to her parents, her sister, who had died young, and her brothers, and not far from the man who had been her